Kind One (4 page)

I am old like I said and can barely bend over to see my boot, but here is a dream in which I run: Linus Lancaster is out by his pigs and Lucious Wilson is standing next to him. They are talking and they turn and look at me. I can’t move and they turn away and I can move again. Then I run. I run out the front door of this house here in Indiana but out into the yard of that other in Kentucky. I run up the road to the stone bridge there, then I am in the barley field here. I stumble and fall by the oak tree there. Linus Lancaster is leaning against the tree. He is shrugging his shoulders and easing some itch he has. I raise myself up and he nods and I am on the road that leads to Lucious Wilson’s house. I run as fast as I can up that road and see that I am in Linus Lancaster’s field. I run past his horses and through his grasses and his daisies and find I am in Lucious Wilson’s barn. His barn has grown bigger than it ought to be and I run across it, past its pens and the hooks hanging sharp on its walls, and see that I am in Linus Lancaster’s shed. My ankle hurts but I run and find myself in Lucious Wilson’s barn. I run and find myself back in Linus Lancaster’s shed. The shed is big and I run across it. Then the shed fills with pigs and I have to run across their backs. They are wet from the slops they have been fighting over. I slip to the floor and Lucious Wilson throws me an axe to cut my way through. I catch it and see Linus Lancaster standing with his back to me and I swing. I swing and hit pig and the earth opens up and I drop and fall and am far below its surface. There is a way forward. Something is behind me but it is not a pig. It is not Linus Lancaster either. “Scary Sue, Scary Sue,” calls a voice I do not recognize. In this running dream I cannot turn my head.

On the fourth day of my parent’s Kentucky visit, Linus Lancaster got us all into his wagon and we went off to the fair. My father did not want to go to any fair, but Linus Lancaster encouraged him and showed him the big bag of tobacco he had at the ready, and in the end he came along. You had to ride a whole half a day and then some to get to that little cornbread crumb of a settlement. It was called Albatross. They were having their fair at the far side of it. They had it in a field that was next to nothing but a barn and a smoky-colored hill. When Horace had let us down, he took the wagon over and set with the other help at the base of the smoky-colored hill. The help weren’t let to come into the rows of tents where they had candy in buckets and colored strings hanging and men calling out to come in and see their show. My father took his look around and said he would just as soon clump up the hill and sit with Horace, but Linus Lancaster said that wasn’t the way of it here.

“The way of it here,” my father said as he clumped alongside me. “I’ve been to a kind number of places they call ‘here’ the way your husband, Linus Lancaster, does, and I know something about the ways of it too.”

My mother had Linus Lancaster’s arm. She had had it for most of their visit. She came about as high up on Linus Lancaster as I did. We followed them into a show about a fish man they’d had up from the bottom of a pond in China. The fish man didn’t have hands, he had flippers. He was blind on the top of it and had been born without a tongue. They kept him in a barrel filled with water. The water in the barrel looked black. It looked cold. My mother said, “Oh my,” and we walked back out.

At one end of the fair they had a stage set up, but there wasn’t anything on it. Linus Lancaster asked a man what they had planned for the stage, but the man said that there wouldn’t be anything on that stage until the next day. Linus Lancaster stood for a long time looking at that stage. I thought about him looking at his pigs and reckoned he might step up and start singing. My mother asked him what he had in mind as he stood there, but he just laughed and galantried himself back on over to her and we all walked off. Every now and then as he was clumping next to me, my father would look up at the smoky hill then look over at Linus Lancaster and cluck his tongue. I said we ought to buy a sack of candy to take back to the girls, but Linus Lancaster opined to us all he’d as soon feed up some of the fine apples they had on sale to his pigs.

“A pig is good people,” he said.

“Now I’ve heard every last thing there is to hear,” my father said.

“I doubt that.”

“Then tell me some more.”

But Linus Lancaster didn’t say another word.

Late that night when we got back in the girls were waiting with a hot supper for us. Cleome dished it up and Zinnia set it down and filled the cups and kept them filled. After Linus Lancaster was in his drink and draping his long self over the table end, my father took a piece of candy out of each of his pockets and gave it to the girls. Then he looked at Linus Lancaster asleep there in his drink and laughed. He laughed so long and hard that after a while it seemed like that laugh had left away from him and had hitched up its skirts and was dancing with hard boots on the table in front of us. That laugh danced so hard across the table I was afraid the cups would fall over onto the floor and break.

“Shush now, Papa,” I said.

He was old too early and crippled, but that laugh was something. Cleome and Zinnia both watched that laugh dance and both took their candies out of their aprons and slowly commenced consuming them. I expect they didn’t even know they’d done it until their mouths woke up into all of that flavor and reached down their throats and pinched.

The next day Linus Lancaster took us on a tour of the house that wasn’t but that he said would soon someday be. We walked in its corridors and took the airs of its rooms. We climbed its stairs and stood in the Charlotte County sunshine on its balconies and looked out into the distances of Linus Lancaster’s fields. Come suppertime Linus Lancaster had Ulysses fetch up a table, and we broke our pork and corn pone in the middle of the future banquet room. My father went along on this tour and snorted not a whit when my mother, dangling like ivy off Linus Lancaster’s arm, would marvel at the line of a wall that wasn’t any more than some milkweed floating through a sunbeam or nod at the clean crack of the glistening hardwood floors we were none of us walking on. He even, at one point, when we were touring the airy attics, commented on the quality of the underroof and the clean lines of the ceiling beams.

It wasn’t until Linus Lancaster was again asleep at the end of his own table, a line of hard drink and slobber curling off his lip, that my father opened his mouth and let the laugh back out again. This time it didn’t content itself with dancing on the table but went off dancing through the house meant to be towering everywhere around us. It danced up the stairs and out the windows and down the halls and across the rooms. Then it led us away from that table set in the middle of the dirt yard, Horace and Ulysses toting Linus Lancaster, my mother fussing next to them, back to the cabin where we all lay ourselves down.

“I heard you laughing, both times,” Linus Lancaster said to my father the next day as they sat together in the yard smoking their pipes.

“I know you did,” my father said.

“If you were any other than my father-in-law I would whip you for it.”

“I expect you would try.”

“Old cripple like yourself.”

“Like I said it, you would try.”

“I saw you handing out candy too like this was your own house.”

“It was either that or feed it to your pigs. And how would you have felt about that?”

“Now, the both of you two,” my mother said.

“It’s all right,” said Linus Lancaster.

“Yes it is,” my father said.

There wasn’t anything much more to that visit from my mother and my father. On the morning they were getting settled out to leave, I told them I was sorry to watch them go and hoped my husband and I could repay the fine courtesy they had paid us one of these times. My father was over next to me when I said this, and he turned and said that he was not sorry. That all he could see in this place with its fine fields and mansions and pigs was dark, and that more dark was coming. I ought never to have left them, and he had his own fault in that, but now that I had I could never come home. There was things in this world and in the other that got started and couldn’t get stopped.

“Let me look at you now, Daughter,” he said.

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me. He leaned his head close to mine. I leaned my own closer to his.

“Follow us,” he said. He whispered it.

I leaned closer.

“Follow us away on out of here, Daughter. I will slow the wagon. Follow us like you did when you tracked me through the wood.”

My father had my own green eyes and I could see mine in his, and we leaned there together as my mother and Linus Lancaster stood off at some distance and looked on. “Hey, Papa,” I thought. I could hear myself holler it. But I heard it as if I was standing down at the bottom of a hole or somewhere under the waters, and hadn’t I just those days before stood there and watched my holler from the past die its death on the forest floor?

“I am married now, Father,” I said.

“And living in that fine house,” he said.

I did not answer this. We stood on there in the morning light a minute, then he turned.

“All right, I’ve had my look,” he said, then clumped up into the cart, and my husband, Linus Lancaster, handed up my mother and nodded at my father, and they clicked the horses and went off back over the stone bridge. I never saw one nor the other of them again.

There is a boy here works for Mr. Lucious Wilson who can sing. They say he came out singing and never quit. He has sung at the county fair and won himself an invitation to sing at the statehouse. I have heard him at the church, which is one of the places I do still go. They like to all go quiet now and again so he can have the show. It is a pretty kind of singing and a pleasant kind of voice. But when I lie down at night and think of that singing and the kind of singing Linus Lancaster could do at that place in Kentucky I know that the boy they stop the piano at church for here doesn’t have half the gift. Linus Lancaster could sing the skin off of one back and onto another. He told it once when a tinker was visiting and they were at the bottle that in Louisville he spent his share of time on the stage making speeches and singing, and that there were fine ladies of the neighborhood in attendance who had cried when he had done so. I did not cry when I listened to Linus Lancaster sing. But I listened and knew I was hearing something.

There were times after supper when Linus Lancaster would push back from the table and make a sound in his throat and give a curl to his lip, and we all knew it was time for a song. Horace and Ulysses could strum and thump when they were on their own time, and Cleome liked to clap and Zinnia to sing in a slow, private way, but it was all quiet when Linus Lancaster got the mood on him to sing after his supper. No one in that house made a sound when Linus Lancaster pushed his chair back and sucked in his air and blew that trumpet out of his throat. There were no uh-huhs or mmm-hmms, and if there was a drop of sweat tickling some lip or a fly biting at some neck the song was over before any of us moved.

Someone once told me when I was still living in my father’s house that I had a handsome voice and ought to shepherd it and not keep it to myself. After that I sang a little louder at our church and took a turn at a solo at my school. One night my first winter in Kentucky I thought to share that solo with my husband when that singing mood came upon him after his supper. He had not favored my story, but I thought he might favor my song. I sang and reckoned it was fair crooning, but Linus Lancaster’s fist came out so fast I thought an angel of the Lord had flown down off his shoulder to bestow its wroth. Even after Cleome, who was standing in attendance, had helped me back to my bench and my husband had wiped his hand and recommenced singing I thought this. I thought it then and now here it still sits. Funny how you can once think a thing then never see the tail of it.

My father liked to say God lived in the lightning and look out below. He told it that in the battles he fought when there was lead or arrows in the air the boys used to holler, “He’s a-comin’!” They get roused up when the fellow at church here sings “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” But I keep quiet when he’s at it. There’s different kinds of glory. There’s all kinds. I have seen some.

MR. LUCIOUS WILSON,
my employer, has pigs. He’s got his pens and fences and keeps them nice, and people come from around to look at them. If I understand it correctly, in recent times he’s had pigs that have earned prizes. For what I didn’t catch, but there were ribbons involved, and Lucious Wilson’s man responsible got a cash bonus and went out cavorting and kissed a girl and spent the night in a ditch. They found his horse five miles away eating at a patch of lawn grass. On account of some pigs.

Time and again when I was still working in Lucious Wilson’s big house I would hear it when they would stick one. Now that is a sound can make me cringe. I understand that there are things that live and things that get killed. That’s God’s plan, and we are all just meat for his platter, well and good. When they slaughtered beef and the beef knew it was coming there was a bellowing in the yard to beat the basket, but they could have killed beef from there until Sunday and I would have kept scrubbing and dusting and setting out the silver or whatever else my employer Lucious Wilson requested that I accomplish. But let that weather get cold and let them start in on one pig and then another and then a third and all of them doing their dying at once, and I would commence to pick at my ankle and decompose in my shoes.

Pigs are smart, and there is a sound that pigs being killed emit and I’ve got the evil rhyme to that particular complaint in my head. Now I live in this little house and do not go to the big house any longer and do not hear it when they put the chisel to their pigs, or smell it when they cut out the chitterlings and scrub the insides, or feel it when they push the pork pieces into the salt. There’s some will do backflips about a bacon breakfast, but I’ve still got teeth enough to get that product stuck between. I’ve still got a tongue to taste the pork blood and eyes to see the red come bubbling up out of the fresh meat when it’s pressed down with a finger or a fork. Lucious Wilson is as close as you can come to a saint on this earth, but I could do without his pigs and the place they give him in my running dream.